Ontario voters have been beaten over the head with reminders that the NDP leader’s willingness to support the Liberal budget tabled this week will decide whether Premier Kathleen Wynne’s minority stands or falls.

But Horwath’s propping up the Liberals has enormous consequences for the future of the Progressive Conservatives, too. Hudak’s Tories have pinned their entire political strategy on pushing for an election as soon as possible.

The problem with that strategy is obviously that the timing of an election isn’t really the Tories’ call. The New Democrats hold all the cards and, so far, they’re not folding.

Horwath’s response to the Liberal budget was coy. But the fiscal plan basically addressed all seven NDP requests — from a five-day wait time for seniors’ home care, to a 15 per cent decrease in auto insurance rates. So it’s highly likely that the NDP will eventually come around to passing it.

Still, the next few weeks are bound to see much back-and-forth between the Liberals and NDP as they tweak the budget, possibly even by writing precise timeline guarantees for delivery on promises into the document.

And where will the Tories be during these debates? Hopping up and down on the sidelines demanding the election that Hudak so anxiously desires.

Indeed, the PCs sound very much like a one-note party now — Hudak’s talking election or nothing. But it’s looking a lot like nothing, at least for now.

Perhaps the Tories didn’t have much choice. On a conference call with reporters Friday, Hudak said he met with both Wynne and Horwath in pre-budget consultations. (“And I appreciated (having had) five meetings with the premier when I had one with Dalton McGuinty,” said the PC leader.) Hudak recounted how he argued for restrained spending, to no avail.

So naturally, he and his Tories can’t support the budget that the Liberals put forward this week, considering that Wynne’s plan would see the province’s spending grow by three per cent this fiscal year from last year’s levels, or twice the rate of inflation.

Of course, no serious provincial politics-watcher expected these Conservatives to back this Liberal budget. But by dismissing it as unacceptable weeks before it was tabled, Hudak also invited jaded Ontario voters to discount anything the Tories might have to say about it.

Their pre-emptive rejection of whatever the Liberals proposed was undisguised at a Hudak news conference in Thursday’s budget lock-up. He was joined in talking to journalists by PC finance critic Peter Shurman (who, by the way, put on such a smooth show that many reporters in the room were left wondering why the Thornhill MPP isn’t the leader). Shurman openly admitted that every budget might have a few good things in it, but that his party wasn’t about to debate this Liberal proposal or that one. They were walking away from the process altogether.

“I want to make this clear, we’re not rejecting line-items in the budget, we’re rejecting a government,” Shurman said.

That’s a valid point of view, even a bracing one. But once they’ve made it, what else is there for them to say? Yes, they have a dramatically different vision for Ontario — and they’ve published 12 white papers that spell it all out — but unless the province is heading to the polls, how many people are going to care about those platform details?

There’s precious little the Tories can do to trigger that campaign, although that doesn’t stop them from haranguing Horwath. A key Tory line of attack is to point out that the NDP leader calls the Liberals’ politically expedient cancellation of the gas plants shameful, and yet she appears fully prepared to work with those same Liberals on a budget.

Horwath, though, isn’t taking the bait. Why would she? The Tories are ahead in the polls. And if the gas plant mess that has taxpayers on the hook for almost a billion dollars is the sort of fiasco that probably should spark uprisings from the masses, so far it just hasn’t. In Ottawa, the scandal has barely caused a political ripple.

So Horwath currently has nothing to gain by triggering an election, and plenty to win by supporting the budget. Indeed, the document so thoroughly reflects NDP demands, the Liberals might as well have put an orange cover on it.

Hudak and his PC strategists would have been better off waiting to reject the budget after they’d actually read the thing, after which they could have offered some real alternatives and pointed proposals for improving it. Sure, the Tories would have ended up in the same place — voting against the Liberal fiscal plan — but at least they’d still be in the conversation.

Instead, they have rendered themselves politically irrelevant at this key moment, leaving the Liberals and New Democrats to hash over the financial fate of province. And looking on passively is, in politics, rarely the best position.

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